


Vive la Vie

by orphan_account



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Artist Grantaire, Enjolras Was A Charming Young Man Who Was Capable Of Being Terrible, Eventual Enjolras/Grantaire, F/M, Les Amis de l'ABC - Freeform, M/M, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-09
Updated: 2016-09-09
Packaged: 2018-08-14 03:20:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,959
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7996732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The blond boy’s face clouded in concentration and he scrubbed a hand through his blood-caked hair. “Enjolras, I think.” He smiled a very small smile. “Yes, Enjolras, that’s right. I’m twenty two years old and I live in Paris, France. That’s it, though. I don’t remember anything else.”</p>
<p>Grantaire wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Someone had told him once that he made a terrible therapist, and so he didn’t offer any words of comfort. “Grantaire,” he said, finally, offering a hand forward to Enjolras. “Twenty five, artist, currently residing right here in this Provins shopping centre. I used to live in Paris, though, before.”</p>
<p>Enjolras shook his hand. “Before what?” he asked, voice curious. </p>
<p> </p>
<p>In which zombies have taken over France, the Amis are scattered to the winds, Enjolras remembers nothing, and Grantaire is alone until an Apollo crashes into his life.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Vive la Vie

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [welcome to the new age](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1143082) by [nightswatch](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightswatch/pseuds/nightswatch). 



> So this is sort of something I've tried to write before (and failed at, of course.) This time, I want to finish it! It's chaptered, but updates will be sporadic as senior year has rendered me very, very, busy. Basically, this is a zombie apocalypse fic in which Enjolras has amnesia. Enjoy!
> 
> Any questions/comments, feel free to ask.
> 
> \--CM

It was strange to Grantaire, the whole ordeal.

 

I mean, first, there had been sirens, and warnings to stay inside, and mass terror in the streets and stuff like that, which was scary to most people. Grantaire had just put his headphones in, locked his doors, and continued painting. After all, work was work, and the asshole who had commissioned him had wanted it done by  _ tomorrow, dammit!   _ But when  _ tomorrow, dammit! _ rolled around, Grantaire had looked out on the street, only a day before filled with screaming people and confusion, and saw only quiet.

 

It was eerie. Like an entire city had just gone dark, the whole of Paris just stopped. There were no cell phones ringing, no television sets or helicopters. Not even any people.

 

Then, Grantaire had seen them. The first one he saw had been missing its leg. He honestly couldn’t tell whether it had been a man or a woman, the face was so caked in blood. It crawled right past his apartment and up the street. 

 

Grantaire wondered, briefly, if that was the reason all the newscasters had told them to stay inside.

 

He had turned on his TV, on impulse. Everything was static but one channel, and on that one channel, the same message had been playing  _ over and over and over.  _ Stay inside. Do not leave your homes. Do not let them touch you. Stay inside. Do not leave your homes. Do not let them touch you.

 

Grantaire remembered wondering if the grotesque thing he had seen counted as “them.”

 

That had been over a year ago. Grantaire had kept a log in one of his disused journals, little tally marks. What would later turn out to be an unparalleled day in his memory was the day he marked his four hundred and eighty-sixth tally.

 

It was early morning. The sun had barely crept over the sky when something awoke him. A loud noise echoed through the empty shopping center he had made his fortress, shattering glass and footsteps, angry, angry footsteps. Grantaire sat up, awake in one motion, kicking his sleeping bag off and reaching for his fencing saber.

 

He couldn’t stop himself from hoping as he crept down the empty hallway, green High-Tops squeaking on the tile floor. His irresponsible heart was still holding onto the fact that  _ maybe just maybe somebody’s alive and maybe you can save them maybe it’s not just zombies _ . He told his heart to stick it, but it only beat faster when he heard a scream. A very human scream.

 

He began to run.

 

He reached the unused escalators before he saw. There were seven zombies in the food court below him, cornering some poor girl with pretty blonde hair. Grantaire sprinted down the stairs, sword in hand, ready for the oncoming storm. He didn’t even feel his ragged breath, all he could hear was his heart, over and over. He beheaded one of the zombies before thinking, and ran a sword through the second just as quickly. The rest of the fight was a shoe-in once the first two were dead. Grantaire stabbed and hacked and slashed and then it was over. The blonde girl was breathing hard, and brushing a curl out of her eyes. She blinked at Grantaire, and he suddenly forgot to breathe. 

 

Three thoughts rushed through his mind in an instant. 

 

First:  _ This is the first living girl I’ve seen in over a year. _

 

Second:  _ Oh, wait, he’s a guy.  _

 

Third:  _ Oh god, he’s gorgeous.  _

 

Grantaire swallowed hastily. “Ah, hello there,” he said. “Welcome to Provins?”

 

The boy stared at him, uncomprehending, before his eyes rolled back into his head and he collapsed on the floor. 

 

Grantaire rushed to the boy’s side. What little he knew about medication involved checking for a pulse, applying Band-Aids, and hoping for the best. He did the first on his mental list, and when he found the boy’s pulse, slow but existent, he let out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. There were no visible wounds on the blond boy, save for a shallow gash across his forehead. Most of the blood caking his clothing didn’t appear to be his, which Grantaire thought, considering the circumstances, was a pretty good sign. 

 

He slung the boy over his shoulder and began to climb the escalator again. It was a long walk back down the hall to the security room that Grantaire had barricaded and holed up inside, and his legs were weak when he unceremoniously dumped the boy onto the floor.

 

Grantaire allowed himself a moment to breathe, and then looked over at the person he’d saved. The blond boy looked about twenty, but he could have been years younger. He had curly blonde hair all a mess with dried blood, and he was wearing too-big clothes that were caked in crusts of red and brown. Grantaire gently unzipped the hoodie and tugged it off. Underneath, the boy was shirtless and emaciated, skinnier than anyone had a right to be. Grantaire didn’t have any extra clothing except one grey shirt, which he drew over the boy’s head.

 

Then he gently closed the door behind him and left. There was still work to be done.

 

He didn’t return to the security office for nearly an hour. Downstairs, the bodies of the zombies had been dragged outside and the broken window had been barred with some large bookshelves Grantaire had discovered. On his way back, Grantaire made a stop in a mostly untouched department store to pick up some clothes for mystery blond. The last hoodie he’d been wearing was red, so Grantaire grabbed a snazzy red jacket from a rack in the corner. It was sort of long, and the gold buttons that closed it were rather tacky, but Grantaire thought that the blond boy looked like a  _ sort of long and rather tacky red jacket  _ type of person. He grabbed a cozy grey shirt as well, and made a mental note to tell the boy to go and take whatever he wanted before he inevitably left to go somewhere better. 

 

That was just Grantaire’s luck, wasn’t it? Find the best place in the zombie apocalypse to stay and no one to share it with. Everyone Grantaire had seen since the attacks began had either died or abandoned him. He supposed this new person wouldn’t be any different, in the end. No one ever was.

 

When he quietly opened the door to the security office, he was expecting the blond boy to still be asleep, or to be sitting and doing something calmly. But when he opened the door, the boy sprang at him with a knife in one hand, teeth bared. Grantaire scrambled away, tripping over his own shoes and falling backwards into the wall. The boy was on him in an instant, knife to Grantaire’s throat, straddling him. His eyes were icy blue and boring into Grantaire’s soul. “ _ Who. The Fuck. Are You.” _ he said, cold and even. Grantaire glared up at the other boy, up at his face and hair, streaked with blood. He looked like a frightening god, out for revenge. 

 

“I’m helping you, man, I rescued you from those zombies downstairs an hour ago or so. Don’t you remember?”

 

The blond boy pressed the knife even further into Grantaire’s neck, baring his teeth, and then all of a sudden, his blue eyes cleared and he rolled off of Grantaire to sit against the wall, knife clattering to the floor with a metallic  _ clink.  _ Grantaire slowly sat up, rubbing his neck where the blade had drawn blood, and glanced at the boy. He was sitting, back pressed to the wall, head in his arms. “Hey, man, you alright?” asked Grantaire.

 

The blond boy’s voice was muffled, head hid by a spray of curly blond hair cascading down nearly to his shoulders. “I don’t remember,” he said.

 

Grantaire was confused. “Pardon?”

 

The boy looked up at Grantaire, face curiously blank, eyes devoid of emotion. “You asked me if I remembered you, and I don’t. I don’t remember anything.” 

 

He stood up, all of a sudden, brushing his ragged and bloodstained jeans off. “I’m sorry I attacked you. I don’t know why I did.” He offered Grantaire a hand, and then they were standing before one another. 

 

“It’s okay,” said Grantaire, regarding the blond boy. “Do you remember your name?”

 

The blond boy’s face clouded in concentration and he scrubbed a hand through his blood-caked hair. “Enjolras, I think.” He smiled a very small smile. “Yes, Enjolras, that’s right. I’m twenty two years old and I live in Paris, France. That’s it, though. I don’t remember anything else.”

 

Grantaire wasn’t sure how to respond to that. Someone had told him once that he made a terrible therapist, and so he didn’t offer any words of comfort. “Grantaire,” he said, finally, offering a hand forward to Enjolras. “Twenty five, artist, currently residing right here in this Provins shopping centre. I used to live in Paris, though, before.”

 

Enjolras shook his hand. “Before what?” he asked, voice curious. 

 

“The zombie apocalypse?” Grantaire prompted. “You know, started almost two years ago, infects people and turns them into killer zombies with a hunger for flesh. Some horror movie shit, man, the world’s gone dark. Everyone’s on their own now. Are you sure you don’t remember that?”

 

“ I get flashes, but nothing specific. I don’t remember anything before waking up here.” said Enjolras. He considered for a moment. “I remember my parents. My father looked like me, and my mother was dark haired and always smiled. I can’t recall their names, or anything we ever did together, it’s like their faces are in a swirl of dark.”

 

“So you’re like Jason Bourne, then.”

 

Enjolras shrugged. “Perhaps. How did you find me?”

 

Grantaire inhaled. “It was early this morning. I was asleep. I heard a loud crash, ran downstairs and saw you. You’d broken a window to get in. You had seven zombies in a knot around you. We killed them, and then you collapsed on the floor.”

 

Enjolras nodded, no recognition in his eyes. “Okay, then. Tell me about you.”

 

Grantaire stood up. “That’s a long story. Let’s get you cleaned up first.”

  
  


\------

 

Grantaire directed Enjolras to the sinks downstairs, which, thankfully, worked, and then found some soap in a bath store and brought it down. When he came back, Enjolras had gotten most of the blood out of his hair and was teasing the damp curls with his fingers in the mirror. He turned to Grantaire when he entered, regarding him cooly. “Yes?” he asked. 

 

Grantaire realized he’d been staring and shook his head at himself. “Ah, nothing. Do you want me to grab you some clothes?”

 

Enjolras took a cursory glance down at what he was wearing, Grantaire’s oversized gray shirt, bloody jeans, tattered shoes. “Yes, I would, if that’s an option.”

 

Grantaire grinned. “Well, Apollo, we are in a shopping mall. Let me see what I can find. Do you remember your favorite color?”

 

Enjolras cocked an exquisite golden eyebrow at him. “Apollo?” he asked, as if the very idea repulsed him.

 

Grantaire shied back a bit from Enjolras, who had started glaring at him. “You know, Apollo? Greek god of light?”

 

Enjolras crossed his arms. “I do remember that, yes. I can name all of the Greek Gods perfectly, for some reason, but that’s not the point. Why am I Apollo?”

 

Grantaire stuffed his hands in his pockets. “It fits,” he said, simply, and left it at that. “Now, favorite color.”

 

Enjolras considered a moment. “I don’t remember it.” 

 

Grantaire remembered the red jacket he had left on the floor upstairs, when Enjolras had tried to knife him. “I have some ideas.”


End file.
